#15038, Daniel (Dan) GURNEY

Daniel (Dan) was the youngest of 11 children (another child, a first son had died in infancy) of a prosperous couple involved in trading and banking.  Having previously lived in Magdalen Street, Norwich the family moved in 1785 to Earlham Hall, a large seventeenth-century mansion surrounded by a wooded park and situated about two miles from Norwich.  The spacious house, built of flint and redbrick, was gabled, with two bay windows and star-shaped chimneys.  With its well-kept lawns, stables, shrubberies and dovecote, Earlham became part of the Gurney legend.  Generations of the family grew up to love the place, with its winding staircases and attics and its eighty cupboards and powder closets.  It was a marvellous house for hide-and-seek.  John Gurney could fish and shoot in the grounds and the children could ride on their ponies or go boating on the river Wensum which flowed by.  His mother died when he was just two years old and his sister Catherine, 15 years his senior brought up the family.

Dan's wife, Lady Harriet died at only 35 years of age leaving Dan with eight young children.  His sister Richenda wrote in a letter about his relationship with his children, "He is particular with them and will be master, but at the same time makes them at ease with him by his extreme kindness and affection."  She also described how Dan and the children would sing hymns together after dinner.

Besides managing his banking business Daniel served as High Sheriff of Norfolk in 1853 and took an interest in archaeology and genealogy.  In 1848 he printed, in two volumes for private circulation an elaborate work entitled 'The Record of the House of Gournay', to which he added a supplement in 1858.  Daniel had married Harriet Hay, a daughter of 17th Earl of Erroll and lived near North Runcton, Norfolk.  Their son Charles Henry Gurney (1833-1899) graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, married a daughter ofHenry Thoby Prinsep, and later became a partner in Saunderson's Bank, London.  The Gurneys remained astive in banking until 1896 when eleven private banks controlled by Quaker families joined together under the name Barclays to meet the competition of the joint stock banks.  The largest component parts were Barclay Bevan, Ransom Tritton Bouverie & Co, of Lombard Street in the city of London, Backhouse's Bank and Gurney's Bank.